Redefining ones self

It's u-Haul season in my neighborhood. Orange and white trucks and trailers are parked everywhere. Some with the words PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND painted on them, and then a map so we dumb Americans can figure out where the hell Price Edward Island is (somewhere between Maine and the Arctic Circle). Others proclaim that Florida is THE MANATEE STATE. And there's one with a giant nasty spider on it that might have words, but I'm too grossed out to look at long enough to read.

Last Friday I would have seen fewer beds in a mattress store. Friday was the BIG move in day for the college students and they've been trickling in ever since. But my apartments offer the option of furnished units if you're willing to pay more and you don't really care that most of the furniture belonged to someone else. Apparently the last thing to be delivered into these furnished units was the bed. A parade of three guys, hired to life and tote for the day, walking from the club house with full mattresses held over their heads/backs trotted past my window again and again. The frames they delivered with a truck.

In all of this, I continue to write, to work on cleaning and organizing my apartment to (a) make it my own little haven, (b) make me feel proud of my space, (c) benefit my mental health. Every so often I dread moving even though I have a lease for the next 12 months. I hate moving when you've just gotten things they way you've wanted them. However the water quality here is for shit. There's so much sediment in the water that my dishwasher is coated with orange, my shower curtain is tinted the same shade, and my Brita pitcher dies every month instead of every two months like it's supposed to. But hey, at least it's a cute apartment.

I've been doing a lot of who am I? what do I want? thinking the past month or two. I've come up with some answers that surprised myself. Some were a long time coming, some weren't. I then got around to the question of so if that's me, how do I want to present myself? is that how I've been presenting myself?

Take this blog, for example. A couple years ago, I recrafted my identity to be all about being a grad student in a writing program. I really wanted to be literary back then. Now I'm much more concerned with being an interesting person/writer than being let into the "literary writers" club. Oh, I'll keep writing, but I'm much more concerned with being interesting than being literary.

I also redid my bio on the side bar and I'm about to redo my bio on the About page. It was all about where I went to school and what I did that added clout to my literaryness. Yawn. Then I read the big fat Bio-writing lie (via). Now it is much more entertaining.

And then the cat who had been sleeping on my desk rolled over and would have fallen to the ground if not for the fact that she reached out her claws into my conveniently placed thigh. Guess that's as good a sign as any that I should end the post.

Video edition

Today's videos recommendations all come from theLiz. She has launched her own blog which is very funny, where in she rants about "how to live in NYC" and life with pets. I whole heartedly encourage you to check it out: Home is Where the Cat Is.

Marcel the Shell with Shoes on



A public service announcement about cat safety (the choice of music/soundtrack might be the best part). From the ever funny people who bring you Hyperbole and a Half:

No ad of the week

There's no ad that's particularly struck me this week, and given real life things, I'm in no mood to go out and find one.  Instead I'm going to speak obliquely in order to speak specifically -- which is precisely why I love metaphor.

Not that long ago, I was in a great mood and a great place mentally.  I was headed down a path that I loved -- a kind of scary path, but I was cool with that.  And there I was, jogging along -- yes, jogging not walking -- when I catch sight of someone building a brick wall a mile down the path. The way, for now, is still clear. But each step I take forward is done with the knowledge that it brings me closer to that wall.

I know that if I make it to that wall faster than I thought I could, then the wall won't be complete and I can hop right over it.  And even if the wall gets completed, there's a chance that I can get there before the mortar sets, and I can push my way through with force.  Either way, I need to speed up if I want to continue.

The difficulty in speeding up has nothing to do with physical strength or the task of running down the path; it's entirely mental.  Can I make it before the wall goes up?  Will I be strong enough to push through it if it's built? Maybe I should just find some other path and take a nice easy stroll. It's hard to make yourself put one foot in front of the other when you're wondering if you should be backtracking as fast as possible.

Of course, if I can just get over my fear and trepidation, I can prove how stubborn and determined I really am. Once and for all, for myself and everyone else to see. ... And if that sounds like a vow, it's because it is.

What a week

Let me start off by wondering how it got to be Friday. Or, for that matter, how it got to be the end of August. It was supposed to be August 10 right about now not August 27.

I suppose the good news is that I work well under pressure, and pressure is what I have between now and Tuesday, the deadline day for a bunch of projects. Then, once the "August" stuff is done, I can do the "pre-semester" stuff by Labor Day. Classes start the day after Labor Day for me . . . but if you were astute, you already picked up on that.

This has been a week of errands, improvements, philosophies, realities, heartaches, and headaches. Oh, and I burned through the first three books by Jeaniene Frost starting with Halfway to the Grave-- which are fucking awesome books with absolutely beautiful cover art.  Kudos to the Avon publishing art department.

August is home improvement month

At least in my world, August is the month of undertaking projects to better the living space.  This month I've built bookshelves and purchased an ergonomic desk chair.  The old desk chair was actually a kitchen chair and was absolutely wreaking havoc on my back and shoulders, especially as I buckled down to write 1000 words a day on my novel on top of other projects.  So I anted up and got the chair.

The chair is the last big step in reworking my work space.  The first step was a half-curtain to block out the soap opera-like antics of my neighbors in the parking lot.  I've set up drawers for storage, a "submissions check off" sheet hanging on my wall (I get a star sticker for each submission I make in the next 12 months), and then there's the shelves.

I love "back to school" sales.  I purchased two some-assembly-required three shelf bookcases for a total of $36 with tax.  No, they're not fancy or particularly well made, but they're the kind of thing that if you treat them well they'll last, but if you treat them roughly, they'll look like shit in a year's time.  The shelving allows me to get some boxes up off the floor and stop using my coffee table as a book shelf -- which had been serving as home for the same 15 books for the past year. 

Of course, those boxes only get up off the floor of my bedroom if I organize the other bookcase to make room for the boxes.  Essentially, this looks like a project that could last as long as my closet organizing . . . which I started last August and will finish (hopefully) someday soon when I finally donate the old clothes I've been meaning to donate for the past 52 weeks. 

August is definitely my home improvement month.  Now if only I could convince everyone of that, I'm certain i could get a hefty endorsement from Lowes. 

I'm curious about when other people's "home project" time of year is.  Does anyone really hold with that "spring cleaning" thing anymore?  Is my year-old unfinished project the worst of the bunch, or can someone beat me for longest unaccomplished home improvement project?

Ad of the Week

I simply adore this ad campaign from Sherwin Williams. They're beautiful, simple, artistic, classy. (They're particularly classy when compared to the Kia gangsta hamsters.)



What really gets me is the creativity and the artistry. In the second video of the campaign, I particularly love the Cardinal "feather" that floats across the screen as the scene transitions. To be honest, I think I like this second one more.

Grab-Bag: Friday Links

An old pay phone booth becomes a book booth. Really cool looking.  I love it when people get creative with their recycling.

Nathan Bransford gives us how to write a novel.  And manages to condense the entire writing process into one blog post, to which I say, Bravo!  I particularly liked the bit about styling your characters based on what the character wants.  I find this aspect particularly helpful when I know a character should be in the story, but I'm not in love with said character and therefore can't really get into them.

Bransford says: "Now, the best protagonists are complex individuals who may want multiple things. They may think they want one thing but in reality want another, or they may want two things that are at odds with each other. But once you know what a character wants, their personality (funny? brave? weak?) becomes an expression of how they go about getting it."

Kay Kenyon gives us some notions on having a writing schedule, or in some cases, fooling yourself about having a schedule.

Books I'm looking foward to this fall

I seem to remember hearing something about Fall being the prime time for book releases.  October, maybe?  Maybe I'm making all this up.  Anyway, here's what I'll be getting my greedy hands on this fall.

Blameless, Gail Carriger, coming out September 1.  Set in late Victorian England, book three of the Parasol Protectorate promises more vampires, more werewolves, more commentary on fashion and a well made treacle tart, and -- something we haven't seen in the previous novels -- more insight into the Soulless, or preternatural, individuals who have the ability to neutralize vampires, ghosts and werewolves.  Book one, Soulless.  Book two, Changeless.  Both one and two are out in paperback.  And don't forget to take a look at the awesome making of the cover video for Blameless at the bottom of the post.

Coming out October 26, is the fifth and final book of the Tairen Soul series (no cover out yet), Crown of Crystal Flame by C. L. Wilson. Set in a secondary fantasy world that is both familiar yet unique to fantasy readers, this series was originally planned to be a four book story arch chronicling an epic romance, the dreams of an unimposing craftsman's daughter, the rise of an old evil, the self-sacrificing love of parents, court intrigue and espionage, and an ancient magic civilization on the brink of extinction.  No wonder she couldn't fit it into four books.  Book four, Queen of Song and Souls, was a bit of a let down but when you consider that it was originally meant to be the first half of the final book instead of a book that stands on its own, then you're willing to forgive it ... so long as the release date for book five is not pushed back any longer.  Book one, Lord of the Fading Lands; Book two, Lady of Light and Shadows; Book Three, King of Sword and Sky.

And, believe it or not, Happy Ever After, book four of the Bridal Quartet by Nora Roberts, coming out November 2. Book one, Vision in White, was something that I grabbed off the library shelves three minutes before closing in a desperate attempt to cobble together weekend reading.  I grabbed probably six books that Friday, only one of which I had thought about reading before I got to the library.  The reason I picked up Vision in White?  Because I had never read a Nora Roberts novel and the packaging was pretty and -- important for a library book -- clean.  I walked out of the library with a half dozen books that day, only two of which I read.  And went back immediately for book two, Bed of Roses.  If you've ever watched Say Yes to the Dress or Whose Wedding is it Anyway, you'll love these novels.  The main character of each book is one of the four best friends who run an all inclusive wedding planning business. Parker Brown's old family estate serves as the backdrop for almost 100 weddings and vow renewals a year; she and her staff (her friends) live on site, doing the photography, making the cakes and fixing the flowers.  Planning weddings are the focus of these books -- planning other people's weddings that is!  All in all, they're a lot of fun, and I have to say that over the past thirty years, Nora Roberts has learned her craft on the job, so to speak.  If you've not read a romance novel before and are afraid of drecky prose turning you off, start with Vision in White; this series has perhaps the cleanest prose I've seen in a mainstream romance.

Blameless, The Making of the Cover video

Attention Defficit and Focus

Last night I found this article on the NYTimes site. A bunch of neuroscientists "unplugged" themselves for several days and sailed down the river together as a retreat and as the prelude to further research. (Read article here.)

They didn't come to any particular conclusions, because this wasn't scientifically conducted, but they did have some interesting discussions. Particularly in the realm of being able to focus verses being able to multi-task.

Perhaps I found the article striking because I've only recently come to my own conclusion that multi-tasking makes everything take longer. While writing my morning pages (yes, I still try to practice the Artist's Way), I realized that if I did the pages how you're supposed to, and wrote three pages start to finish without getting up and without letting myself do other tasks, I could finish them in about 30-35 minutes. On days when I took my iPod touch with me and checked email, surfed the web, looked up how to spell words, checked my calendar, sent reminders, I spent 60-80 minutes trying to write three pages. More than double the realized time.

Also, when I got up from those morning pages, I didn't feel particularly focused or purposeful. On days like today, when I didn't let myself check my email repeatedly, and focused only on the page, I stood up and felt ... well ... I felt smarter. Like I had a purpose for the day and I knew what I needed to do and how to do it.

No where in the article does anyone say technology is bad or that we need to fully unplug. What they're discussing is the notion that the format our technology takes is cutting into our mental productivity. It's not email, texting, or instant messaging that's cutting into out attention span, it's the expectation of email.

This was my "aha!" moment.

Whenever I let myself check the iPod for email, etc., my pages took longer to write. Most days I didn't read the email I checked on. Just looked to see what was there. Then looked back again every 15-30 minutes to see what else was there. Often there wasn't new email, but I'd already been derailed from the task of writing morning pages, so I was off on another task for the next few minutes.

I'm now reevaluating how I work on the computer. If I'm on the computer, my email is open. And, right now, like most days, I have 14 web pages open at once. These are things I started to look at but didn't want to read right then, so I left them open to get back to later. They're multi-tasking processes that are spinning their wheels and not accomplishing anything. Frequently I get overwhelmed and frustrated with the amount of pages(tabs) I have open and I have to walk away from the computer or shut them all down. Now I'm thinking that the key might be to not have that many open in the first place. To force myself to finish a task without getting sidetracked into opening a new page in a new tab.

It's also making me more sympathetic to my students. I'm still not amused by shortened attention spans in the classroom, but I'm more sympathetic to the fact that they're no longer being conditioned to sit through long discussions, or have long discussions without allowing technology to interrupt those discussions (lecture, or in-class discussion that they participate in) and rupture their focus.

Thoughts? Suspicions? Anecdotes? How often do you check your email? How often do you check it when you're not at your desk/computer? Do you think it's working, not working? Is there a way around it or is the way through it?

eBooks the new mass market paperback?

Earlier this month, Dorchester announced that they were no longer going to print paperbacks.  Publisher's Weekly printed something, then the Wall Street Journal printed something because it's a nice hot topic issue.  Over on the blog Pimp My Novel, there was a post about how ebooks are the new mass market paperback.  And I didn't post anything.

I wanted to process this a little bit.  See if there was really anything worth talking about.  Try to figure out what my opinion on ebooks as the new mass markets.

I have these thoughts which are listed in no particular order and may not add up to any particular conclusion:

• I have purchased ebooks and read them on my computer.  I even read a 200 page novel entirely on an iPod touch (think iPhone but not as fancy).  
• My last four novel purchases were real books books purchases in brick and mortar bookstores.  three of them were mass market, and one was a trade paperback.  The four purchases before that were real books purchased online.
• The Wall Street Journal's poll of online readers of the article, broke down roughly into thirds.  478 people (about 33%) bought their last book in "real" format but purchased online.  568 people (39%) bought a real book at a real store.  419 (29%) bought a digital book online.  It's roughly even between the three categories, but when you compare real books to digital, it's 72% real, 29% digital.  (obviously, percentages have been rounded up)
• I spend a lot of time reading on the computer.  Switching to reading on paper is relaxing.
• I don't own an e-reader (unless you count the iPod touch), but I've played around with a 6" display Kindle at length and found it aggravating and cheap feeling.
• I've played around with a Sony e-Reader and found it to be a piece of shit.
• I've played around with a Nook and found it to be better than the Kindle in terms of both aggravation and feeling of quality, but not enough to make me want to buy one.
• Last fall I had to read Melville's Bartleby the Scrivner for a class assignment.  The instructor didn't order the text at the bookstore because it was out of copyright and available on Project Gutenberg.  I got to class and the instructor was prophesying about how one day no one's even going to buy text books because we'll all be reading them on computers.  "You can say that," I said, "but once I found out that this was eighty-some pages I went to the library and checked out this." I held up the hardbound copy of Bartleby the Scrivner and Other Short Novels.  The woman sitting next to me had done the exact same thing.  The girl sitting beyond her groaned and said she wished she'd thought to check at the library.
• I enjoy the ability to flip quickly through books.  To flip back to sections I want/need to reread or to jump forward to see how many pages the chapter or novel has left.  eReaders are not yet fast enough to flip quickly.  They are also extremely inefficient as text books for this reason.  Loading pages takes time.  Finding the page that you typed a note into takes a lot of time.  Grabbing on to the post-it hanging off the side of a page and yanking the book open to that spot takes a second at most.
• Earlier this summer I listened to a podcast where an established SF/F author was discussing his new publishing venture.  I forget his name.  But essentially, if you paid the fee you received a chapter by email every week for 20 weeks or something like that.  At the end of 20 weeks, the author mailed you a signed copy of the finished novel.  The novels were going to have a print run limited to subscribers.  The author's theory was that physical books, particularly hardcover books, were going to become souvenir of reading much like the t-shirt is a souvenir of the concert.

In the end, I wasn't able to make anything of this information except that eReaders are not yet technically advanced enough to tempt my usage.  (Whether or not the iPad is advanced enough to tempt me is a moot point because it's out of my price range.) And therefore, I won't be buying a Dorchester book for some time.

I did develop one new opinion in the process, but it has nothing to do with prophesying about the future of the book.  What I've come to realize is that ebook-news will always be in the news these days because it's a polarizing topic -- some people get all excited about it and some people get majorly cranky -- it's just like Sarah Palin-news and just as annoying.

Ad of the Week

This is an honest to goodness ad as seen in New Zealand. Free stakes for the taking beneath this handy dandy public service announcement.  I think I'm in love.  Dear ad designer, call me; we should date.

Grab-bag: Friday Links

Amazon.com presents their list of the best books of the first half of 2010. Funny, I haven't read any of them, and haven't heard of most of them. Honestly, the only one I've heard of is The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, and all I really know about it is that it's in every damn bookstore I go into and that the author has been dead some four or five years.  Everybody loves ya when you're dead, I guess.

The New York Times real estate section shows you what you can get for $350,000 in three very different cities. Be sure to check out the photo slide show.

From the blog that brought you "Alot is better than you," we get "things that don't turn out like I'd envisioned."  Both are complete with illustrations.  Very cute.

A new promo video for "The Guild" is out.  Every time I see one of their promos, I wonder why it is that I don't watch their webisodes.  Then again, it might be that, as a non-gamer, I just don't get all the jokes.  Still the promo video is fab.



And, if you're like me, you watched that video and tried to get a good look at the cover of the book she's reading.  I wasn't able to identify it, but the good news was that Kristin Nelson of Pubrants satisfied my curiosity for me: it's Bewitched and Betrayed by Lisa Shearin.

I recently came upon this post from Uncanny Valley (via), which lays out the blogger's pedagogy for his first time teaching intro to creative writing at the college level. He promises to keep blogging about his expectations and realities as the semester progresses, and I certainly look forward to those posts.

And lastly, today is International Left-hander's Day, started in 1976 to remind the world that "Lefties have rights."

The slush plie process

To add to yesterday's discussion, I give you this illustration of the submission process courtesy of Defenestration, an online magazine for humor on the web.

Click through to their site to see it bigger, or to just plain be polite and check them out.

Death of the slush pile?

(Hehe, I almost wrote "death in the slush pile" while typing the above title ... that might just be a more interesting, though macabre post.)

Check out this essay posted on the web last month.  It suggests killing the slush pile and moving on to something better.  Then in the comments, editors freaked out.  The writer calmly pointed out that no writers had freaked out over his response.  To oblige, I will now, as a writer, freak out:

The proposed killing of the slush pile involves writers posting their work online and editors sifting through the internet's slush rather than the slush of a specific magazine (I'm badly paraphrasing here, so read the link before taking me at my word or slaming me).  As a writer I now control who gets to look at my work -- that is, I get to control which editors and which magazines have the opportunity to print it.  If my work is up on the internet just waiting for an editor to come along and scoop it up, then how am I to know that Podunk Magazine's offer is really the one I should take?  The New Yorker hasn't made me an offer.  Would they?  At least with the slush pile system I am able to know with certainty that The New Yorker won't publish my story because I offered them the chance and they sent me a terse rejection note.

Besides, if we killed the slush, then we'd be killing SlushPile Hell.

Detox is a bitch

I've spent the past five or six days in a funk.  I sat inside and did nothing but read novels.  I thought about writing, then felt unworthy and didn't.  I ate meals of ramen noodles, then felt awful as I slipped into carb overload.  A pile of dirty dishes grew to take over a counter and a half.  I had no clean plates.  No clean forks.  I do not know if the mountain of dishes fed the funk, or if it was a symptom.  I suspect it was both.

For three days now I've made myself go walking each evening.  Tonight I tackled Dirty Dish Mountain;  It is no more.  I've switched to a ramen-free diet.

I'm feeling better, but not good. I'm still just barely writing.

I told a writing friend, and she suggested that perhaps this was the post-Odyssey low.  (She'd read about it as the "infamous post-Clarion writers block," but given the similarities of the programs we're certain there's PTSD symptom overlap.)

Perhaps it is, I told her, I just didn't expect it to last this long.  More precisely, I thought it was over.

For about five days after returning from Odyssey I was comatose, waking up just long enough to make coffee and go back to sleep.  Then I recovered.  I got my feet back under me.  I cleaned like a maniac.  I made plans.  I did research.  I reclaimed my life and my brainpower.  Or so I thought.

Detox is a bitch.

I might have physically recovered, but I'm now at the I'm Unworthy stage of recovery.  On Friday, I finished reading the Mercy Thompson series of books by Patricia Briggs, which are absolutely great urban fantasy novels.  And by great I mean that they are entertaining, engaging, plotted better than I could plot, and they don't do any of those things you're not supposed to do ... and they didn't do any of the things that keep tripping me up when I write.  I came to the panicked conclusion that if I wrote urban fantasy I couldn't write as well as that.  Of course, I've read a lot of urban fantasy that's not as good as Patricia Briggs, so the feeling of unworthiness shouldn't have been as overwhelming as it was.  But detox is full of downward spirals and this was (is) one of them.

Here's the tough thing about Odyssey's six week workshop set up: you make giant leaps forward while you're there, but the leaps are never good enough.  There's always some other goal on the horizon that you've not yet achieved, and you're always aware of it.  You feel the great joy of achieving a goal and overcoming a weakness in your story, only to have the workshop shred it for other reasons.

Now, I'm a very practical person when it comes to workshop.  I know that workshop is a place to put aside your feelings and get honest feedback from a large group of readers who have the training to articulate what in the story makes them feel the way they do. I do not consider my stories to be my "babies" or "children" or "gems" or even "diamonds in the rough." They're stories and they can always be made better. I appreciate and understand the process.

The feeling of frustration does not stem from having "my baby" shredded; it stems from making giant leaps forward, and then having workshop tell you that the story's still not good enough.

It's true that it's the job of the workshop to ferret out the issues in any piece of fiction, and that a workshop of happy readers who tell you work work is finished and ready to send out the door "as is" is a useless workshop ... but damn if that don't take the wind out of your sails.

It was week three of workshop when I got to the point where I knew that my ideas weren't going to work, but I didn't yet know enough to fix them.  That was six weeks ago, and I feel like I've stalled at that place.

Ad of the Week

This commercial creeps me out. You may have seen it, it's been on TV quite a bit lately.



The other Kia hamster commercials were odd, but not scary. I guess they wanted to make a bigger splash. They did.

Still, I find the hamsters -- and this new gangsta hamster mutation -- strange for a car company that not all that long ago fired its CEO over a "presidential soap on a rope" commercial because they wanted to be perceived as a more serious car company.



Let this be a lesson to us all: soap on a rope will get you canned, but hamsters are your friends.

Feeling very out of it

I've been reading Patricia Briggs novels non-stop this week. I've read four in a row. When I finished the first two putting down the book felt like coming up for air: gasping and disoriented, and for a moment the silence of the water follows you above the surface and you can't hear anything except the water sluicing in your ears. And slowly, very slowly, that false quiet retreats.

Today I finished the fourth book and still feel like I've been swimming all day. My body is tired and achy, presumably from spending so much time curled up on the couch reading.

They're great books -- I never would have so submerged, or sat so long, if they weren't. But I'm in desperate need of reconnecting with the outside world.

August, in my world, in home improvement month.  I've been building bookcases.  Well, I've built one and if my foray into the real world goes well, I'll have purchased and built a second one sometime this weekend.  I've already reclaimed my coffee table -- it was serving as a bookshelf more than a table -- and a few other spaces.  With another shelf, I'll have much more useful space in my living room.  It also means continuing to throw out the useless and give away my not all that small collection of literary journals.  I'm quite excited with the bookcases and the purchase of several small items such as a new kitchen rug and a cheery placemat to go under the cat bowls (they like to play in their water and make me a mess).

Last year at this time I cleaned and organized my closet.  I even pulled out a large amount of clothing to give away.  This year, I'll actually give it away.

Doh!

I had the absolutely most awesome idea for a story while driving home today. By the time I reached my apartment, the idea seemed utterly stupid.

I hate when that happens.

I'm going back to wallowing in ice cream and "Mercedes Thompson" novels (written by Patricia Briggs).

Morning coffee

Morning coffee and editing.

I have a piece I want to edit again and get into the mail today.  So I give you this article which explains why I have to comb through this piece yet again: "In the Details," Writing Advice by Mette Ivie Harrison, published in the current issue of Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show.

Story in print today!

A short story of mine titled "Color, Patter and Fantasy," hits the web today as part of The Northville Review's Summer 2010 Celebrity-themed Issue.

All of the stories in the issue are themed to include celebrities in some fashion. In my mind at least, that skews the issue toward having a bit more humor and lightheartedness -- something I readily endorse in lit mags, if only because of its rarity. 

I started writing the story in 2009 at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and the piece has since taken some twists and turns. It's short and sweet, coming in at about 1,700 words, and (hopefully) you'll find several humorous moments.

For those of you who know me as having a fantasy/urban fantasy/magical realism penchant, you should be warned that the "Fantasy" of the title falls more along the line of day dreams than fairies. ...Not that I've ever attempted to write about the fey specifically, come to think of it.

Since it's a celebrity themed issue, my bio on the site contains a little known factoid (depending on who you are) about my former celebrity crushes.

Published today: "Color, Pattern and Fantasy" in The Northville Review online.

There once was a dragon ...

There once was a dragon who wanted an ice cream cone more than anything else in the world. ...

And then he got one, and it was bigger than his head. And his head, coincidentally, was as big as the rest of his body.

But to tell you how he did it would be giving away the whole story, six weeks of writing instruction, and an in-joke.